No-one likes general adverts, and ours hadn't been updated for ages, so we're having a clear-out and a change round to make the new ones useful to you. These new adverts bring in a small amount to help pay for the board and keep it free for you to use, so please do use them whenever you can, Let our links help you find great books on glass or a new piece for your collection. Thank you for supporting the Board.

These sites will be unavailable for as short as time as possible. All need major software upgrades. They will not all disappear at the same time, one by one and probably for a day or two each. Once that has been completed I will be fully back to adding new content - initially for the Glass Zoo.

The urgency of these upgrades has been the recent hacking of two of the sites.

This is going to take longer than expected 8 days on the first of the three sites so far and only on step 5 of about 50 steps...

On top of which I will probably have to manually correct a lot of the descriptions as there seems to be no way to preserve accented characters, quotes, fractions and symbols

This happened with Scotlands Glass corrupting over 5,000 which I only finished doing recently. A problem that will not recur in the future as characters are stored properly by the databases now. But noit in these old databases. GMB had a similar problem in recent move.

Further down the line... I got all off the data for one site successfully migrated. But have failed to get the software functional. Our Anne has been a great help.

It is also apparent that the same corruption of certain characters has occurred in the migration as happened to Scotland Glass with a similar version to version migration.

But this time round I have to go through two stages of migration (only one for Scotland's Glass) so I have decided to install the software for the latest version without data and reload the data the hard way. Well not too hard as I can copy text from old site versions to new. I will start doing this tomorrow with first site, glass catalogue, I will the do the glass zoo and finally glass-study.com which should be the easiest.

One problem with this is the users will need to request new passwords to be able to log in. I will contact all members directly. So lots of 15 hour days for the next 5 or 6 weeks!

Scotland's Glass 'should' migrate painlessly.

Running websites of such complexity can be difficult at times! The good news (for me) is that future upgrades are now a part of the software and will be mostly one click and done.